DeWain Valentine: Kurt's Unpublished Commentary
For the last few years De Wain Valentine and I have known each other as both artist and writer and as good friends. I saw one of the earliest exhibitions of his sculpture when he participated in a group show in 1966 at the Dwan Gallery in Los Angeles, then directed by Mr. John Weber. Since that time I have followed Valentine's artistic evolution (if such a thing ever really happens) both in galleries and in his studio. Upon occasion we talked about the work in depth and detail, enjoying discussions that were in many ways like the one that follows.
At the end of this last summer De Wain Valentine was preparing for his first one-man show. This event was also to mark the opening of ACE, a new art gallery cum theater space in Los Angeles directed by a young Canadian, Mr. Douglas Christmas (who also heads the Douglas Gallery in Vancouver, B.C.). The occasion provided Valentine and myself with a fine rationale for our attempt to articulate something of the stylistic history and more general background of his recent sculpture.
It never has been easy to pin down the origins of art, whether they are understood as the sources of aesthetic inspiration for the individual artist or in the larger sense of whatever it is in the environment of the artist that may find some demonstrable expression in the final work. For every word of gnarled prose on the subject written by philosophical aestheticians like Martin Heidegger, there are pages of poetizing by lighter and less rigorous writers. But from whatever direction the problem is approached, we don't seem to get very much closer to grasping the formal cause of a work of art in Aristotle's sense. With the refinements and sophistication of art historical thinking, particularly within the last half century or so, in some ways we are better able to explain aesthetic ideas and stylistic elements in terms of traditions within the fine arts. At the same time, however, the ground seems to be slipping out from under our feet. During the same half century we have come to search for the origins of a work of art in fields that stretch far beyond the often strictly constrained realm of the fine arts.
No longer can we assume with confidence that the most direct influences upon the content and/or style of a work of art will derive from another earlier work of art. This assumption formed the backbone of the conventional art historian's approach--and it works pretty well for art created before the twentieth century. That is, it works pretty well for the so-called fine arts. But precisely as the twentieth century began to discover profound and permanent values in folk art, primitive or native art, naive art, child's art, the art of the subconscious or of the insane and the popular arts, it became clear that the convention of the "fine" arts in the Western European tradition had been rather arbitrarily self-restricted. Painting and sculpture began to reach outside their own conventions and even began to reflect in a functional way these other modes of artistic expression.
In the 1960s the reciprocal nature of influences between the "fine" and the "other" arts can be exemplified by the impact of advertising upon painting with Pop Art, and the counter-thrust of Op Art's influence upon the world of commerce. Now the fine arts also seem to have forsworn many of their claims to a uniquely privileged position in our culture. To the historian of art, the student of cultural change or the humanist, the documentary value and intrinsic significance of such disparate non-fine-art forms as color TV, pro football, rhythm and blues or rock and roll music, automobile "styling," skin flicks, ads, billboards, and ghetto or student riots, should be well beyond serious dispute. Of course the most clear cut and immediate way in which these various cultural phenomena are expressed or reflected by the fine arts is in terms of subject matter, such as the use of imagery from newspapers, TV or the movies by fine artists like Robert Rauschenberg or Andy Warhol. Subtler influences can be discovered in the realm of style, or in Rauschenberg's use of Day-Glo, TV type color in the series of Bonnie and Clyde lithographs, or Warhol's florescent-hued Marilyns. Important as these relationships may be for the the arts, they remain relatively close to the surface--both literally and in a more figurative sense.
It becomes a rather more difficult question--and one of perhaps greater theoretical importance--to establish some pattern and direction of influence from the world of popular art, technology and non-art on works of conventionally "fine" art such as the recent sculpture of De Wain Valentine. The difficulties arise because Valentine's cast polyester pieces, like so much "minimal" work of the last few years, is almost entirely devoid of associational clues of the kind that create a coherent and ready available iconography for Pop Art painting. And yet, perhaps the most impressive general point to emerge from the discussion that follows is that no matter how formally austere and apparently aloof Valentine's sculpture might appear, from its deep sources to its final highly finished surface this art is also radically conditioned by factors coming from outside the province of "pure" sculptural concern. Of course there are still conceptual and stylistic relationships between Valentine's sculpture and that of the preceding fine arts tradition of sculptural expression--he mentions, for example, the work of Robert Morris and Donald Judd. This one might have deduced without a tip from the artist, although such confirmations are always welcome. But the revelations of this interview--the data lively to prove of most value to us in our attempt to understand and articulate the complexity of sources and influences upon works of art--pertain to the total vital sphere of the artist's relationship to the world. De Wain Valentine may be telling us far more about his sculpture when he recalls building cars or collecting rocks as a kid then when he discusses specific works included in the Whitney annual.
What follows is the transcript of a discussion tapes: expressly for this article. It has been only very slightly edited. Most of the questions and comments are pretty straight forward, but the pace and tone of the conversation did change somewhat. Valentine was particularly animated when he began to talk about cars. The message would be quite clear for anyone listening to the tape- and it can be fairly well inferred even from the text: there is a kind of meaning for the Artist, and presumably also a kind of relevance for the art, contained in that whole world of experience that includes custom cars. But there was also an intense involvement with problems of the technology of plastics--a kind of excited seriousness which again underscores the significance of essentially non-fine arts sources for Valentine's thought and work. Indeed it often seems like De Wain Valentine is telling us most about his art and about himself as an artist when the conversation strays from the strict subject of sculpture. It may just be that every revelation of truth is a digression. In the end of course, Valentine's sculpture remains very much fine art in its appearance and conception. But in a fascinating way its aesthetic power is amplified the more firmly it is placed in a broad, twentieth century frame of relevance.
Read the transcript of the interview with De Wain Valentine.